The secret is out! Today Google released the entire Android stack as open source software and guess what version control system they are using? That’s right, it’s Git.
I say ‘the secret is out’, because we happened to know about this a bit beforehand, since I’ve been down to the Google campus a number of times in the last few weeks helping to train the Androids there in Git. I was asked by Shawn Pearce (you may know him from his Git and EGit/JGit glory – he is the hero that takes over maintanance when Junio is out of town) to come in to help him train the Google engineers working on Android in transitioning from Perforce to Git, so Android could be shared with the masses. I can tell you I was more than happy to do it.
I gave two talks for the Android team, working with Dave Bort (the handsome guy you see in the video on the front page here) and Shawn to develop material that will help them specifically in transitioning from Perforce and highlighting the tasks that they felt would be most common with thier workflow and project size.
Logical Awesome is now officially offering this type of custom training service to all companies, where we can help your organization with training and planning if you are thinking about switching to Git as well. If you would be interested, send me an email at scott"logicalawesome":http://github.com/logicalawesome.com">logicalawesome.
If you’re interested, the tech talks that I gave there should be available on YouTube once Google finishes post-producing them. We’ll be sure to remind everyone when that happens. :)
I would love to hear some of team Android’s thoughts on the transition from perforce to git. We have a legacy perforce system here but mainly use svn with a few of us trying out git. Perforce can be difficult at the best of times.
Congrats to the team Scott, it’s a great reward.
Hmm the “repo” script fails for me on OS X 10.5 – why couldn’t they manage with straight git like the rest of us?
dysinger – they have to deal with a project that is enormous. It is the Linux kernel, plus over 100 other git repositories that need to be managed both separately and together, and submodules wasn’t going to cut it for a number of reasons. They are also managing the project through a patch review process that repo implements. If you are having issues with ‘repo’, you should file a bug, since I’m sure Shawn would want to know about it.
schacon – yeah I realized this after I went to go clone directly and saw the bazillion repos. Heh.
the script fails for me on ‘import readline’ in the python code. this is fixed with “sudo easy_install readline”